Why Hillary Clinton might have just two more weeks or so to announce she’s running for president (Washington Post)

Fear in Chelsea on the campaign trail: third Clinton is Hillary’s secret weapon (The Guardian)

April 4, 2015

Wherever Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, campaigned heavily in a state, the Obama people were alarmed to see polls tighten between the two rival candidates among a crucial demographic: young voters. In states such as Arkansas, California and Massachusetts, the 27-year-old Chelsea even helped neutralize Obama’s advantage with under-30s altogether.

Now, as her mother prepares to announce a second run for the White House, Chelsea Clinton is about to be unleashed as Hillary’s not-so-secret weapon.

Having spent much of her life trying to avoid her parents’ career path – in 2008 she was still working on Wall Street – Chelsea has finally, openly embraced her inheritance as part of one of America’s most powerful political dynasties. Clinton-watchers and family friends say she is certain to be a visible part of her mother’s bid, especially to women, for the highest political office in the world – though not without the invisible dangers on the way to becoming America’s first daughter once more.

“Those around the Clintons believe she’ll be a very senior adviser to her mom,” said Amie Parnes, co-author of the bestselling HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton. “Chelsea will be used in a big way this time around.”

From an enigma to star in the making

Back in 2008, Chelsea Clinton was still something of an enigma. She had never given a single major interview. After some of the things said about growing up in the White House – Rush Limbaugh notoriously compared her to a dog and Senator John McCain made a comment too offensive to merit repeating – she was naturally wary about public exposure.

At one campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, she was asked a question about her parents by Sydney Rieckhoff, a reporter for the education magazine Scholastic News. Rieckhoff was no ordinary reporter – she was nine years old and in the fourth grade. Yet when she pitched her question in a squeaky kid’s voice, Clinton replied: “I’m sorry, I don’t talk to the press. And that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you’re cute.”

That was then. In the intervening years, Clinton has shed her publicity-adverse outer skin, giving interviews to major publications like Vogue and appearing on stage with Stella McCartney, taking up a temporary job as an NBC News correspondent and turning up on late-night talk shows.

Chelsea has also worked hard – very hard – at piling on public-service credentials, in the Clinton family fashion. Last May she acquired a doctorate in international global governance from Oxford. Concurrently, she has risen up her parents’ philanthropic business to become an equal partner in what is now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

She frames her ambitions as wanting to lead a “purposefully public life”, raising inevitable questions about her own ambitions for political office. In stark contrast to the many years she spent shunning such queries, she has begun to respond with an unforced openness inconceivable a few years ago – and with linguistic jujitsu handed down from her tantalisingly evasive parents. Yes, Chelsea has said on more than one occasion, it is possible that “at some point” she might decide to run herself.

“She’s at a different stage in her life now – she’s a fully formed adult, she knows her place in the world. She will be a visible and important surrogate to Hillary Clinton,” said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.

No baggage, no ceilings

Last time on the presidential campaign trail, Chelsea travelled hundreds of thousands of miles, visiting more than 100 colleges and universities across more than 30 states in an attempt to draw young professionals away from the charismatic Obama and toward her mother’s camp. Though now 35 years old, the youngest Clinton – her six-month-old daughter, Charlotte, is officially a Mezvinsky – is expected to continue zeroing in on the 18-29 demographic from the campaign’s launch well into next year.

Pollsters have already said of Hillary Clinton’s challenges heading into the general election, assuming she wins the Democratic nomination this time, will be to persuade young voters to stick with her at the stratospheric levels achieved by Obama in both his contests: he attracted 66% of the youth vote in 2008 and 67% in 2012). Winning over so-called millennials is expected to become even more of a focus with her likely Republican opposition already casting votes for Hillary Clinton as votes for the past.

“Chelsea brings a fresh face to the Clintons,” said Parnes. “While her parents evoke both positive and negative emotions, she is the one who doesn’t bring her own baggage to the campaign.”

Chelsea’s other appeal to her mother’s team – now led by fellow 35-year-old Robby Mook – is that she falls directly into a second critical target demographic: young, professional women. In 2008, Hillary Clinton avoided making gender an outright political issue for her cause, putting emphasis on her dependability instead and, in conceding to Obama, saying she had made “18 million cracks” in “that highest, hardest glass ceiling”.

But the Clinton family has already made it clear that women will be front and center this time around: shattering that ceiling to become the first female president will be a definitive selling point to the American people.

The mother-and-daughter pair have been forging a veritable double-act on women’s issues in recent months. As the controversy over the family’s use of a private email server bubbled up last month, Hillary and Chelsea joined Melinda Gates in New York to promote No Ceilings, a campaign for the full participation of women in political and public life.

Chelsea’s public remarks on behalf the foundation, too, have increasingly honed in on what she calls “empowering women and girls” – a theme primed for a stump speech in early battleground states like Iowa and New Hampshire.

The dangers in a dynastic symbol of inequality

There are land mines, of course. Should Chelsea take on a prominent, even pre-eminent role in the 2016 Clinton campaign, the family risks further highlighting that they represent a dynasty – an exalted status as Democratic royalty that could alienate voters who already distrust what they see as a Clintonian sense of entitlement.

Chelsea Clinton could face the same accusations her mother has long endured: mudslinging about an extremely wealthy individual claiming to stand up for struggling middle-class families. Hillary, now summoning talking points on the inequality debate from some 200 economic minds, ran into trouble during her book tour last year when she talked about the Clintons being “dead broke” after they left the White House.

The family is not “truly well off”, Hillary Clinton told the Guardian in June.

Chelsea has taken in plenty of snarky criticism herself over a Clinton wealth gap, mostly having to do with her $11m home in Manhattan, the $600,000 she was being paid by NBC until last summer for largely softball interview segments, and the $75,000 she now reportedly commands for each public speaking engagement. (She insists all the money goes to the Clinton Foundation.)

In an interview that same June, she said: “I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t.” That didn’t help the dynastic aura of even the most well-intentioned Clinton.

But as her mother’s team puts the finishing touches on a formal campaign launch – its lease on an office space in Brooklyn may have started a 15-day countdown on Friday – they are likely to conclude the upsides of Chelsea vastly outweigh any possible glitches.

In some ways Chelsea Clinton’s whole life has been training for this moment. As she likes to tell audiences, her parents debated with her at the dinner table from the time she was four – expecting her to have firm opinions that she could defend. There will be plenty of that in the run-up to November 2016.

The third generation of Clintons

Now Chelsea is a mother in her own right, after giving birth in September. The arrival of a third Clinton generation offers a projection of Hillary-as-devoted-grandmother. That image is gold-dust to campaign image-makers who struggled in 2008 against a perception of the candidate as cold, distant and calculating – conclusions already being drawn by the rightwing media and a growing army of Republican opponents.

“There’s a narrative about Hillary Clinton that she’s not like you, she’s not warm and friendly, she’s not Bill Clinton,” Walsh said. “She suffered from that early on in her first campaign and it’s going to be incredibly important to bring out her human qualities, to humanize her.”

Research commissioned by the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which seeks to advance the electoral prospects of female candidates, has found that a double bind still exists. While male politicians can attract voters’ support by appearing strong and decisive, even when they are not perceived as being particularly likeable, women still have to prove to the world they are both qualified for office and likeable.

“Voters are perfectly willing to vote for a male executive they think is qualified but do not like. However, they will not vote for a woman they find unlikeable even if she is qualified,” the researchers concluded.

That’s another mountain that Hillary Clinton must climb. The comfort is that she will have Chelsea right beside her.

Amie Parnes expects to see the former secretary leaning on her daughter – as well as infant Charlotte – as very public examples of why she’s running: “You already hear her talking about her granddaughter and I’d expect much more of that. I’m sure we’ll hear something about how she hopes by the time her granddaughter is grown that she’ll experience equal pay.”

Debbie Walsh predicts that, together, Hillary and Chelsea will sound a clarion call for women’s equality on the trail wholly unlike anything heard in 2008. “This time there will be less holding back, less uncertainty. The Clintons have learned that when they embrace women, children and families, they are both more effective and more authentic.”

Hillary Clinton Is the Perfect Age to Be President (Time)

By Julie Holland

April 3, 2015

Time

At 67, Hillary Clinton is now a “woman of a certain age.” So much emphasis and worry are put on physical aging in women that the emotional maturity and freedom that can come at this time are given short shrift. That robs everyone of a great natural resource. As women of a certain age, it is our time to lead. The new standard for aging women should be about vitality, strength, and assertiveness.

One of the largest demographics in America is women in their forties to sixties, and by 2020 there will be nearly 60 million peri- and post-menopausal women living in the United States. Because women’s average life expectancy is currently 81 years, we’re easily spending a third of our lives postmenopausal. That is a great opportunity for growth and change.

The long phase of perimenopause is marked by seismic spikes and troughs of estrogen levels, which can last for more than a decade in many women. But afterward, there is a hormonal ebbing that creates a moment of great possibility. As a psychiatrist, I will tell you the most interesting thing about menopause is what happens after. A woman emerging from the transition of perimenopause blossoms. It is a time for redefining and refining what it is she wants to accomplish in her third act. And it happens to be excellent timing for the job Clinton is likely to seek. Biologically speaking, post-menopausal women are ideal candidates for leadership. They are primed to handle stress well, and there is, of course, no more stressful job than the presidency.

Estrogen is a stress hormone that helps a woman be resilient during her fertile years. It rises and falls to help her meet her biological demands, which are often about giving to others: attracting a mate, bearing children, and nurturing our family. When estrogen levels drop after menopause, the cyclical forces that dominated the first half of our lives have been replaced with something more consistent. Our lives become less revolved around others’ and more about finally taking our turn.

In my new book, Moody Bitches, I look at how women are taught from an early age that moodiness is a problem to be fixed. That is simply wrong-headed. Women’s moods are our body’s intelligent feedback system. If we learn to manage them properly, they are a great resource and a tremendous source of power. They show us when we are primed for certain challenges and opportunities.

And the post–menopausal emergence, if you will, coincides with the point at which most women will have a fair amount of experience under their belts. (Perhaps they’ve already served as a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State, for instance.) This is often the right time to make a push, to take more of a leadership position, enter a new arena, or strike out on your own. My mother was a great role model in her perimenopause, taking her symptoms in stride and referring to her hot flashes as “power surges.” She got another degree and switched careers; that appealed to me as a teenage girl. Now I see this rise in power as a way to channel new energy and even new anger. It’s a chance to make changes that should’ve been made decades ago. This may also be the time when children — adolescents, in particular — are ready to take on more responsibility, so perhaps there is a benefit for everyone in changing that family dynamic.

“I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” said a 73-year-old Ronald Reagan of 56-year-old Walter Mondale. Hillary would begin her presidency at exactly the same age Reagan did, but her life expectancy would be longer than any other president in recent times. And she would have all the experience and self-assuranceof a post-menopausal woman, ready to take her rightful place at the table — or in the Oval Office.

Julie Holland, M.D., is a psychopharmacologist and psychiatrist, and the bestselling author of Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER and Moody Bitches: The Truth About the Drugs You’re Taking, the Sleep You’re Missing, the Sex You’re Not Having, and What’s Really Making You Crazy, out this month.

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